There’s only one interesting conversation I like having with people who like Aaron Sorkin scripts and that’s this: The guy was ON FIRE from A Few Good Men, The American President, through Sports Night and into 3 seasons of The West Wing, which he wrote almost exclusively by his lonesome. Thing is, the guy was freebasing cocaine and doing loads of pot. The interesting question after watching Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip burn out right quick is: does Aaron Sorkin do his best work on drugs?

But, since that has little to do with this script review (unless someone can attest to Sorkin’s habits these days), I apologize for the digression.

A blog called ScriptShadow has read The Social Network, Sorkin’s first draft of the Facebook movie and actually seems to have enjoyed it:

Part of my love for this 162 page script is that Sorkin doesn’t use any discernible structure. I was constantly looking for a base, an obvious story or goal. And there isn’t any. 99% of the time when this happens, the script’s a disaster (don’t try it. just, don’t) But Sorkin uses some crazy unknown voodoo screenwriting tricks to keep us riveted. In the end, our curiosity is what drives the story as we’re wondering if Sean – who’s already sacrificed his personal life – will end up getting sacrificed out of a business as well. Did he indeed steal this idea from Cameron and Tyler? Or are these two spoiled brats lashing out because they can’t handle the one time things didn’t go their way?

The Social Network is a either a modern tragedy or a modern success story depending on how you look at it. Imagine going from nothing to a billionaire in less than a year. How do you even grasp that kind of success? How do you live a normal life? How do you address the constant lawsuits that eat into your everyday existence? And how do you do this at 22 years old? When I was 22, just scraping together enough money to buy a case of Busch Light Draft was a victory. Either way it’s fun to put yourself in Mark’s shoes and picture how you’d handle the situation.

You can read the whole post HERE.

The plot synopsis that preceded this except runs pretty close to the numerous articles about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, so I think we’re looking at an almost-bio-pic film, driven by technology, even if we don’t spend a lot of time with code monkeys in front of a screen.

Sorkin does snappy work, and when he finds the rhythm of a plot and character he’s capable of delivering some of the best writing out there.

Someone rush him a dime bag for draft two.

• The Facebook Movie Resurfaces With David Fincher
• Facebook Movie

Last August, I joined a Facebook Group started for Aaron Sorkin (writer of The West Wing, Sports Night and A Few Good Men) by his assistant Ian Reichbach. Ian was internet savvy enough to manage the Sorkin Facebook presence as Aaron poked around the social networking site so he could better write a Facebook movie for producer Scott Rudin. Vulture confirmed with Rudin that Sorkin wasn’t crazy and there was such a movie in development.

Cut to: yesterday, when a Variety story filled in some of the gaps for this mysterious project:

Columbia Pictures is in advanced talks with David Fincher to direct “The Social Network,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted film for Columbia Pictures about the formation of Facebook.

The film will focus on the evolution of Facebook from its 2004 creation on the Harvard campus by sophomore Mark Zuckerberg to a juggernaut with more than 200 million members.

Scott Rudin and Michael De Luca are producing with Trigger Street’s Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti.

You’re probably picturing what I’m picturing: West-Wing-style walk-and-talks with Fight Club/Panic Room style CG tracking shots through floors, walls and keyholes. Which actually sounds kind of nauseating, but if you’re David Fincher and you need to make dialogue visually exciting, that might just happen.

What was not reported while the internet erupted in a simultaneous cry of “this is stupid” is that The Social Network is actually based off a non-fiction book titled The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by author Ben Mezrich, who also wrote Bringing Down The House, the book that would spawn the film 21…also produced by Kevin Spacey.

Logic would suggest that Spacey and producer Scott Rudin got their hands on an advance copy of The Accidental Billionaires and decided to option the project a year before the books publication date (us normals can buy our copies starting on July 14th), slapped Aaron Sorkin on the job of adapting it, tossed Sorkin’s script to Fincher, added some yeast and they’re ready to go later this year.

The book’s official description goes like this:

Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order. Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university’s servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.

What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart. The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.

Call me crazy for not hating this project, but if both Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher can safely put their names on it, shouldn’t I not dismiss it just because, up until today, it was “The Facebook Movie?”

• The Social Network’s Script Gets Reviewed (Yes, The Facebook Movie)
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• Facebook Movie

Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing and Charlie Wilson’s War, has announced on his Facebook profile that he will be writing a movie about the site. At first I was confused as to how a Facebook movie would work, who would be the villain and where would the explosions come from? However, I read the following:

“I’ve just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I’ve started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she’s been dead for 33 years.)”

Mark Zuckenberg created the site in 2004 at Harvard during his sophomore year. It now has over 60 million members and is valued at $16 billion. No doubt things will need to be made up, such as a love interest. A geek who created and ran a huge website would have had no chance of a female, so one will need to be created to please the movie going demographic.

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• The Social Network’s Script Gets Reviewed (Yes, The Facebook Movie)
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